2025-2026

Cleo Krejci

Cleo Krejci covers workforce development and manufacturing in Wisconsin for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She developed her love for accountability reporting after uncovering dangerous building code violations at a student housing complex as a sophomore at the University of Minnesota. She continued working for her student paper, the Minnesota Daily, until graduation in May 2020, including as editor-in-chief of the 70-person newsroom during senior year. That summer Krejci left her hometown of Minneapolis to spend 10 weeks covering national politics for the Arizona Republic via the Pulliam Journalism Fellowship. From Arizona she moved to Iowa, where she spent two years covering K-12 and higher education for the Iowa City Press-Citizen and Des Moines Register. In summer 2022 she got a full-time job as an unskilled caregiver in a memory care unit, trusting it would serve as fodder for a later project about U.S. elder care.

TucsonSentinel.com

The Tucson Sentinel is a nonprofit independent digital newsroom that informs southern Arizonans about the community challenges and unique culture of this area. It is the only locally-owned source for watchdog reporting. This award-winning newsroom serves readers in Tucson and rural stretches of Pima County, along with the other border counties of Santa Cruz and Cochise.

Jim Nintzel

Jim Nintzel covers politics for the Tucson Sentinel, an online news agency based in Southern Arizona. Prior to joining the Sentinel, Nintzel spent more than three decades as a reporter and editor with Tucson Weekly, covering politics, science and rock ’n’ roll. He has been named a journalist of the year by the Arizona Press Club and the Arizona Newspaper Association and has won more than 50 state and national awards for his work. He has previously worked for the local PBS affiliate, hosting a weekly political roundtable, and has appeared on CBS, ABC, CNN and other national news networks as well as various NPR affiliates. He taught government reporting at the University of Arizona Journalism School for more than 15 years.

Longview News-Journal

The Longview News-Journal is part of third-generation, family-owned community newspaper and multimedia news organization. We are committed to digital-first community journalism—not just reporting the news, but also holding officials accountable for their actions. We work to keep the public informed of the news through our print and digital platforms. We strive to be fair, accurate and respectful while reporting the news, from hard-hitting investigations to the daily news and features. Our goal is to use all available journalism tools in the service of reporting on, and bettering, our community.

Aubrey Wright

Aubrey Wright is a multimedia journalist covering equity in higher education for WFIU/WTIU Indiana Public Media in Bloomington, Indiana. Prior to joining WFIU/WTIU, she worked alongside The Columbus Dispatch’s metro desk as a full-time intern and freelanced for The Columbus Jewish News. She produced a multimedia enterprise project on the rise of gunfire into family homes in Columbus and served in The Columbus Dispatch’s award-winning Mobile Newsroom while covering education, health, crime and business. She is a recent graduate of The Ohio State University, where she earned a B.A. in journalism and served as managing editor for content at The Lantern, the student newspaper. As managing editor, she covered Ohio State’s biggest issues, including police violence and its presence on campus, multiple criminal trials and a decades-long sexual abuse scandal.

Hannah Gross

Hannah Gross covers education and child welfare in New Jersey for NJ Spotlight News, a nonprofit news organization. Previously, Gross reported for NBC10 Philadelphia and Telemundo 62, where she covered gun violence prevention efforts in Philadelphia, a chemical spill in the Delaware River and other local issues in English and Spanish. She has also held education reporting internships at the National Education Association and Forbes. Gross graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2023 with a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Hispanic Studies. She spent most of her college career reporting for NBC10 Philadelphia, Telemundo 62 and her school newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian. Gross hails from South Orange, NJ where she got her start as a journalist working for The Columbian, the student-run newspaper at Columbia High School in Maplewood. There, she reported on school segregation, mental health and student drug use. Gross is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. She enjoys baking, reading and making jewelry.

Brooklyn Draisey

Brooklyn Draisey covers higher education across Iowa for Iowa Capital Dispatch. Prior to joining the Iowa Capital Dispatch team, Draisey reported stories from the Quad-Cities, covering the region’s arts and culture community and connecting individual perspectives to larger issues influencing everyone. She fell in love with journalism at a young age, watching national news and reading local publications with her family, and has pursued her career in the industry since joining her high school newspaper. She worked as a reporter and editor at The Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa’s student-run newspaper, and reported on Eastern Iowa for The Gazette and The Southeast Iowa Union before graduating in 2021. Draisey holds a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Mass Communication and certificate in Entrepreneurial Management from the University of Iowa.

Meredith Melland

Meredith Melland is the community engagement and neighborhoods reporter for Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service. Before returning to her home state and joining the newsroom, she covered COVID-19 and other topics, edited stories and managed the website and social media of the Daily Journal in Kankakee, Illinois as the newspaper’s digital content editor. During her college years interning in Chicago, Melland fact-checked articles in Chicago magazine, wrote digital stories at WGN and did a bit of everything as an editorial intern at StreetWise. Melland holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from DePaul University, where she developed a keen interest in local community journalism. While on staff as a web developer and editor at 14 East, DePaul's online student magazine, she reported multimedia stories and earned an SPJ Region 5 Mark of Excellence Award with reporter Marin Scott for in-depth reporting on a professor of color’s termination and attempt to gain tenure at DePaul. Melland got her first taste of reporting and newsroom bonding at her high school’s publication, The Norse Star.

Carlos Nogueras

Carlos Nogueras reports on the vast Permian Basin region in West Texas for the Texas Tribune, writing about the hundreds of thousands of people who shoulder the impacts of an extraction-based economy in the oil and gas capital of the country. Before relocating to Texas, Nogueras was a political reporting fellow for Al Día News in Philadelphia, a bilingual digital paper and magazine covering Latino politics, its dynamics, power players and the policy shaping the Hispanic community. Nogueras has written extensively about Latino lawmakers—their stances versus their words, promises on the campaign trail and how they helped define municipal local politics. In Puerto Rico, where Nogueras was born and raised, he was a freelancer writing about the unpaid labor behind motherhood during the pandemic, gun violence and the waning coffee industry. He earned his bachelor's degree in music from Berklee College of Music in Boston and began his master's degree in journalism at the University of Puerto Rico.

Michael Symonds

Michael Symonds tackles the rural meets metro beat at WMUK 102.1 FM in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Symonds started his journalistic career as staff reporter with the Western Herald covering news and community, and cultural issues and events on Western Michigan University’s campus. After this position, Symonds worked as the lead Community & Culture reporter for the Western Herald. In addition to this, he worked as a general assignment staff reporter for WMUK 102.1 FM covering life in Southwest Michigan and hosted the talk show Stupid Questions on 89.1 WIDR FM, where he interviewed myriad guests including political experts and registered student organization leaders. Symonds graduated from Western Michigan University in 2023 with a bachelor's in journalism and digital media.